


Slow Poison

by Gehayi



Category: Fairy Tales & Related Fandoms, Les Fées| Diamonds and Toads - Charles Perrault, PERRAULT Charles - Works
Genre: Fairy Tale Curses, Gen, Magic, Magic-Users, Revenge, Snakes, Villains
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-19
Updated: 2016-05-19
Packaged: 2018-06-09 13:16:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6908704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gehayi/pseuds/Gehayi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How to create a villain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Slow Poison

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Chocolatepot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chocolatepot/gifts).



_As for [the fortunate girl's] sister, she made herself so hateful that her own mother drove her out of the house. No one would take in the miserable girl, so at last she went into a corner of the woods and died._ — [_Les Fees/Diamonds and Toads_](http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/perrault05.html)

Or so everyone wanted to think, and so everyone repeated without end until the lie was believed. 

Think. If everyone shunned the girl, refusing to shelter her from storm or snow—and refusing as much because of her disagreeable and arrogant demeanor as for the toads and snakes that fell from her lips with every word—how likely is it that anyone from her village deliberately wandered into the forest to discover what had become of the odious creature? After all, it was not as if she was a threat that needed to be hunted down with all alacrity. She was merely an objectionable person that no one, not even her own mother, wanted to trouble themselves about.

So Fanchon—that was the nickname her mother had bestowed on her—vanished into the woods, and not a soul pursued her. Indeed, several most likely rejoiced that they were rid of her at last, and then told themselves that the joy they felt was nothing more than understandable relief.

Now the forest was vast, extending over enough acres to form a good-sized nation, and crowded thickly with tall, smooth-trunked and silver-barked beeches and gnarled, slightly twisted oaks. It had long been used by woodcutters, and sharp-edged stumps still damp with resin, as well as stumps that were ancient and fungus-covered, were scattered throughout the wood. Here and there, too, were the anthill-like conical kilns of charcoal burners. An uncertain trail barely the width of a human foot led into the sun-dappled wood. 

It looked, in fact, like a _tame_ forest. A young woman who had only entered it once before (on the visit to the spring that had ruined her life) and who would not have entered it now if she had not been desperate might be excused for thinking that all would be well as long as she stayed on the path.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Fanchon was not thinking at all, save of all the vicious ways she would punish her mother for flinging her out, her former neighbors for refusing to give her shelter or even a kind word, her younger sister for wedding a prince so selfish that he refused to care for either of his in-laws, and the thousand-times-accursed fairy who had cursed her to spew venomous snakes and poisonous frogs for the rest of her miserable existence. She did not conceal her tears and frustration as her sister Jeanne-Marie would have; she shrieked and swore at the top of her lungs, battering tree trunks with stray sticks and flinging what stones she found along the path in every possible direction. And if someone had told her that she was wounding the trees and might harm or kill a bird, beast or person with one of those stones, her only response would have been, "Good." She was not in a forgiving or repentant mood.

Indeed, many of Fanchon's former neighbors had already told her that she should beseech God or his saints on her knees without ceasing for forty days and forty nights. Surely, they had said, with pursed lips and a righteous air, this was divine punishment for the scandalous way that she had treated her own sister. Others had informed her that she should walk barefoot over nettles and hot coals for seven years to mollify the fairy who had cursed her; perhaps then the creature would be satisfied and would assent to break the enchantment. They were shocked breathless when Fanchon told the second group that she had had her fill of the fairy's vaunted "mercy" and the first that she hoped to be there when God flung a lifelong curse on them for their own part.

"After all," she told them, toads and adders falling from her lips with every word, "you knew well enough what was going on for ten years or more…but _you_ did nothing to stop it."

This suggestion had not gone over well. Nor had Fanchon's mother relished her daughter saying that she'd learned both her manners and the proper treatment of Jeanne-Marie from her, so it was unjust that only _one_ of them be punished.

And so, having stirred up a wasp's nest of hatred, she had been forced to flee the village that had always been her home, wearing nothing but the clothes on her back, and resentment and bitterness burning in her heart like a live coal.

***

Although Fanchon loathed the forest—and how could she not, lacking food, water and the tools she needed to keep herself alive?—she refused, from purest malice, to leave it. The fairy who had stolen her voice—for who would listen to or trust someone whose every word was living venom?—dwelt somewhere in these miserable woods. Fanchon intended to not only crush the creature to dust, but to shatter the spell before the fairy died. She intended to take no chances. There were too many stories about powerful spells becoming impossible to eradicate when their casters died.

Although she knew no magic and had not the faintest idea of where to find a teacher, much less on who was not a charlatan, she refused to think about this…or even to admit that either might be an obstacle in breaking the fairy's curse. Although she was so proud that she could strut sitting down, she had no illusions about the likelihood of a prince coming to save _her_.

But first, of course, she had to survive. And that was not easy.

She scrabbled at the dirt with her hands, trying frantically to dig up herbs and roots that could feed her and bait traps for rabbits and squirrels. She struggled to build traps when she had not the faintest notion what a trap should look like. She licked dew from the grass in the morning. When she found a small stream at last, she drove herself to distraction by thrusting her hands toward the small fish flitting about in its depths just a hair too early or too late. And she wept with rage when she caught a small squirrel in a snare, realizing that she had no way to kill, skin or cook it. 

Her clothes had become tatters, her hair straggly, her face haggard and her body bony before she realized that she had had food with her the whole time, if only she could bear to eat it.

Huddling beneath a tree in a vain attempt to shelter herself from the autumn wind, she spoke two words, and dinner, in the form of a toad with poisonous breath and an adder with colorless venom dripping from its fangs, fell into her hands.

Her first meals were messy, almost bestial, and foul-tasting, for the poison in the breath (or sometimes skin) of the toads and the venom in the poison sacs of the vipers and adders was so bitter that it made her nauseated, so much so that she often wondered why the beasts and their poison hadn't killed her. She suspected something of the answer already, but her mind shied away from it.

Do you wonder why she did not return to her village, starving and wretched as she was? Would not begging everyone's pardon be easier than devouring raw toads and snakes? Did she not covet fresh-baked wheat bread, warm cream-filled milk, and sweet, spreadable honey? 

Of course she craved such things. How could she not?

But even if she had not been as proud as Lucifer (and twice as unwilling to admit that she was wrong), she could no more have returned to her village than she could have breathed the earth under her feet. For the path that she had followed into the forest ended in a tangle of trees and thorn bushes, and once it petered out, she could never find it again. For better or for worse, the forest had trapped her, and it would not let her go.

So, day by day, she ate what there was to eat, striving not to think of her luxury-filled past and her dubious future. For while she had entered the forest in early spring, it was now the autumn of the year. Soon snow would begin to fly. And she had no shelter, no cloak or shoes, and nothing with which to make a fire, for to Fanchon, flint looked no different than any other stone.

Despite having solved the food problem, she was still doomed to die. 

She would just have a bellyful of venom-drenched meat when she did it.

***

Her teacher, when she finally appeared, was not precisely what Fanchon had been hoping for. Not that this mattered.

It was a chill, windy morning in late autumn. The sun had not yet risen, but the sky, slowly brightening with rays that would not reach the earth that day, was coated with the whitish-gray of clouds preparing in for a long, steady snowfall. Below, the grass was brown, while the earth was covered in branches, mast and withered yellow oak leaves. Oval brown leaves tinged with orange clung to branches of beeches, whispering in the slightest breeze. A callously indifferent landscape, drawn in deceptively ordinary grays and sepias. 

The weary, haggard beggar woman whose clothes were little more than holes strong together by a few pieces of thread was not a proper part of this picture. And the biting wind told her that killing cold was on its way, and might arrive that very night.

"I _hate_ this!" she screamed—or tried to scream. Her voice, once so loud, had grown choked and congested by constant exposure to cold and damp. And, as always happened when she spoke, poisonous beasts fell from her lips: a warty toad, a small frog bedecked in scarlet and black, and a blue-black viper. Groaning, she picked up the viper, preparing to kill it with her teeth.

"No, mistress!" cried the viper. "Don't eat me!"

Fanchon paused, eyeing the snake suspiciously. "Say something again." This was accompanied by a sea snake, a baby python and an asp.

"If you eat the toad and the frog instead, but spare me, I can help you."

"Why?" demanded Fanchon, dropping the viper and snatching up the toad and the frog before they could escape. "Why should you help me? And why haven't any of you spoken before?" This last was rather indistinct as she killed and disposed of them in a few bites each, and then gathered up the seventeen other creatures that had fallen from her mouth after four brief sentences.

"We have been," said the viper patiently, "but until yesterday, you hadn't eaten enough of the magic of the fairy's spell to understand beast speech. Now you have. So now you can hear me when I say that if you have learned this much, you can learn more."

"Why do you care?" Fanchon repeated, scowling down at the viper. "Animals offering to help humans…that's the sort of thing that happens to my sickeningly sweet sister, not me." Then she stared at the ground in consternation, realizing that she'd just added twenty-three creatures to the seventeen in her impromptu larder.

"Leave them," said the viper, "unless you're still hungry. It will do you no harm to have creatures hereabouts with a spark of mortal and fairy magic in them; they and their descendants will always come when you call, and that, in time, may be worth more than a meal. As for why I am willing to help you—" The viper rippled, performing an elegant, all-body shrug. "I have vast knowledge of magic, but I possess only a spark of it. You've ingested so much of your own curse that the magic creating it has become a part of you…though possessing magic is of no use if it's not trained and polished. I can help you do that. But in return, I want you to do something for me."

"And that is?" Fanchon ignored the three toads dropping from her mouth.

The viper gazed up at her, its round, pupil-less, cobalt blue eyes fixing on hers. "I want to fly. Whether I do so as a snake with wings or in some other form altogether doesn't matter. I want to fly. I can't transform myself. But _you_ could change me…if you were willing to learn magic, that is."

"Yes." And though it was only one word spoken in a husky voice—a word which spawned an intelligent adder who, as soon as it landed on the ground, hastily slithered away—it held a note of unmistakable triumph.

"It will not be easy," the viper warned Fanchon."It will take years—perhaps decades—to learn what you need to learn."

Fanchon shrugged. She had always assumed that her revenge would take time. 

"Then," said the viper, "have you any questions?"

She had a thousand questions—so many, in fact, that she could feel the toads and snakes swelling into being in her throat and could taste their poison at the back of her throat. "Just three," she said, endeavoring to speak loudly and clearly and doing her best to ignore the inevitable rain of poisonous and venomous reptiles. "One—where in this forest can I find shelter that is warm and safe, and, if you know that, will you show me the way to it? Two—where can I find flint so that I can start a fire in or near the shelter? And three…what is your name?"

"Bera," replied the viper quietly. "My name is Bera."

***

Bera asked to ride on Fanchon's right arm (to which Fanchon readily agreed), bidding her to pick up a stone of flint and fire _here_ and another _there_ before guiding her to a cavern deep in the forest. The entrance to the cave was framed by bleached white stone on either side and was oddly rectangular, like a door.

"It is a place humans made, or at least one that humans once interfered with," Bera said, no doubt noticing the look of astonishment on Fanchon's face. "It is called the Cavé du Diable; it once led to a watchtower, but first thieves seized the tower and then witches and demons, and now the cave and the remnants of the tower belong to no one. There are even rooms inside, and they are warm and dry."

Fanchon was more than willing to investigate, but not in the dark. So, after being talked through the crafting of a torch, she lit it and walked into the cave and began exploring, Bera still on her arm. She soon discovered that Bera was right, and that a maze of rooms had been painstakingly chiseled from rock. Not an animal's den, but a veritable underground mansion. For the first time since that past spring, she began to feel a bit hopeful…

…and then the torch guttered, and went out.

"I think," said Bera's voice, sounding much more expansive in the endless dark, "that this would be a good time to learn how to cast the spell for light."

It took time. Over and over, Bera gave the same instructions: make a fist with her left hand, thrust the left hand out as if she were going to punch someone while shoving magical fire down through her arm and into her fist. Over and over, Fanchon swore under her breath, spewing finger-length snakes and centime-sized toads. But then there was a flicker, and then a spark, and finally a strong green glow that illuminated the cave.

"Excellent," Bera commented, a great deal of satisfaction in her voice. "Now _you_ know you can do magic as well. That will make things much easier.

"Tomorrow," she added, casting a concerned eye on Fanchon's rags, "we will go out and gather whatever plants are still growing this late in the season and find some way to turn them into cloth. You're molting."

***

And that was the beginning. Bera guided Fanchon every day, showing her how to make flax, to spin, to weave, to light fires, to cook—and, since ingesting word-toads and speech-snakes at least once a day strengthened Fanchon's magic, not only how to disguise the creatures as ordinary food but how to make them palatable as well. She likewise taught her the spells for the crafting of tools of metal and glass; how to conjure temporary things, like iron cauldrons; how to weave clothes from shadows; and how, with a simple gesture, to read news on the wind and magic in stone.

She also, over time, answered questions…sometimes questions that Fanchon had not known that she wanted the answers to. Such as where the magic had come from.

"The fairy, of course," said Bera. "She was only channeling her magic through you and your sister. But the flowers and jewels don't speak to the queen"—for by now the prince had ascended the throne—"or if they do, she can't hear them because she doesn't eat them. You started to eat my kind because you were starving. And so the magic became a part of you instead of part of her. She's much, much weaker now than she was before." A gloating note seeped into Bera's voice…one which Fanchon could not help but empathize with, though she did not understand why Bera hated the Fairy of the Forest so.

But Bera, when questioned, merely hissed. "Her power gave birth to me, true. Does that mean that I cannot despise her? Do you not loathe your own mother for flinging you out, most likely to die? Do you think that the fairy ever considers the fate of the magical 'children' she's abandoned to their fates, any more than your mother ever thinks of _you_?"

At times like that, Bera's words were like a spear through the heart.

At other times, she spoke of Queen Jeanne-Marie. The fairy, it developed, had been watching over her for many and many a year.

"And the queen's happy," Bera added, "or considers herself so. But she has grown to hate the flower-and –gems spell; she forever feels as if cold, hard rocks are forming in her throat, choking her. And thorns, sharp-edged leaves and faceted gems as sharp as knives are forever slicing her lips and the inside of her mouth bloody. She has begged the Fairy of the Forest to remove it from her, but she has refused, and so have her daughters."

This roused a small glow of satisfaction in Fanchon's heart. At least she was not the only one who felt accursed.

"She would hate it all the more," Bera continued, "if she knew that the spell keeps her childless."

"What?!"

Bera sighed. " _Sssss._ Of course. The spell keeps her as she was when it was first cast. It's the nature of such spells. Fairies have little notion of age."

"I've aged!" Though not, Fanchon had to admit, very much or very fast.

Bera looked at her with what might almost have been pity. "You have grown older…but you do not age as mortals do. Not any longer. Not after eating fairy magic."

The sudden realization of what Bera was not saying struck her like an assault from a massive hand. "I'm…no longer human." And despite herself, she couldn't turn the words into a question.

"There is a reason," Bera replied with terrible gentleness, "that mortals should never eat or drink anything that comes from the fairies."

"But—" She felt as if she was going to explode. "Why didn't you warn me?"

"Warn you?" Bera stared up at her. "Warn you about what? Eating my spell-spawned siblings? You had been doing that for nigh on six months when I first spoke to you! You were no longer human when we met—and you were nearly dead of trying to be what you were not!" She paused for a moment, and then said in a bewildered voice, "You chose life and magic over death. Is that so terrible a choice?"

She had never been a good or virtuous person, nor had she ever wanted to be. Now, however, she thought of the years she had spent striving to shame those who had cast her out and wondered if there was a point any longer. They would despise her if they knew she'd lost her humanity so easily. Her mother would sneer at her stupidity and weakness. Because the transformation must have done something to her, mustn't it? Otherwise, she wouldn't be standing here longing to weep.

It was all the fault of the Fairy of the Forest—her and that cow, Jeanne-Marie.

"I want an end to the curse," she said when she felt she could breathe again. "I am weary of having venomous beasts fall from my mouth."

"If you end it now, the Fairy of the Forest will feel the spell snap and will replace it with a stronger curse," replied Bera. "Listen to me—there is another way. Build a nexus for your power. Say…the old watchtower near these caves."

She agreed that rebuilding the watchtower was an excellent plan. However, she would not—could not—let the curse go on for one more minute. The thought was repulsive.

"Is there no way to redirect the spell?" she asked. "So that, perhaps, when I spoke, the magic from the spell would flow into my bones and blood automatically?"

"Yes," Bera agreed. "There is a way. But it would mean that the venom would flow into you as well. And that would be a waste."

"It won't poison my _body_ ," she said, her voice gravelly with hatred as she ignored the creatures falling about her. "And I won't let it poison my mind, either, now that body and mind are all I have left. Let the venom fill my magic and make it deadlier. Let it fill the place that used to be occupied by my soul. _That_ is allowed, is it not?"

***

She refused to call herself "Fanchon" any longer, since it was a human name. Instead, she renamed herself Funeste—"disastrous" or "baleful." 

Once the curse was redirected, magic grew immeasurably easier. The tower would have grown at ten times the speed that it did if not for Bera's repeated warnings that too much too fast would attract far too much attention.

She amused herself by learning showy disguise spells and by studying the elaborate etiquette of the fairy courts. She summoned and tamed the descendants of the toads and snakes she had not eaten, often granting them other forms to carry out missions for her. She practiced conjuring and spells of permanent transfiguration—"to give you wings, Bera." Anyone watching Funeste would have sworn she had adjusted to her own transformation and was now at peace. Only Bera was not fooled. She saw hatred in each motion of Funeste's head or hand and unholy fury behind each brittle smile.

Jeanne-Marie, Funeste learned from Bera and the wind, was ill. The redirection of Funeste's curse had confused her sister's, and now it was working and failing to work at the same time.

Funeste felt no guilt for this. It would be absurd to expect her to remain imprisoned so that her sister—who, since her mid-teens, had been far more fortunate than Funeste—could continue to have a blissful life filled with love, riches, comfort and power. The fates could not be _that_ naïve.

As the tower grew, magical spell by magical spell, Funeste sent out scouts to tell her about the Fairy of the Forest. They told her much—that the creature was not only old beyond human reckoning but careless. Funeste's transfigured spiders crept into the fairy's castle and spun detailed maps of each corridor and room. After diving into the moat, toads told their mistress what lay beneath the surface. Serpents crept onto the fairy's mountain and brought back news that few, if any, of the animals or people on or around the forest and the mountain had any love for the old. She was weak…weaker than Funeste had dreamt.

At last, when the tower was built strongly enough to withstand ten thousand magical storms, Funeste set out for the fairy's mountain, clad in simple homespun and wearing the face of the middle-aged mortal she should have been. Bera, too, was with her, riding in her basket disguised as a young sparrow that had fallen from its nest and been adopted as a pet. Funeste would have given her teacher wings by now—reluctantly, but a bargain was a bargain—but Bera thought this unwise. "After she is dead and can no longer hurt either of us. After, not before."

When they finally arrived—and be sure that it was a long journey, and all the more perilous because neither one could take their true form nor reveal their magic—Funeste did not stumble to the fairy's door and beseech her for food or a place to sleep. There were rules, she had read in the books of fairy etiquette, about guest-right. Even if the person was your mortal enemy, you could not persuade them to let you in and then take advantage of their foolishness later. To do so brought down a deadly curse. And Funeste had had her fill of deadly curses.

So she did what a thousand women on quests have done. She went to the kitchen and asked for a job. And the chief cook, who was at her wit's end due to an employer who was likely to hex anyone who put one toe wrong from one day to the next—or even someone who put a toe _right_ —hired her on the spot.

Funeste did not waste time. She slipped magical poison into ointments that the fairy used for her hands, into perfumes, into medicine. She coated the very dishes that the fairy ate off of with poison; she drenched the sheets of the fairy's bed in it. The only thing she left untouched by poison was the food. Meat tainted with poison and venom had been a sore point for her for far too long.

It did not take long before the old fairy was ill…and, more important from Funeste's point of view, nearly as powerless as a mortal.

One by one, the servants, who had long feared the old fairy's notions of kindness and justice, crept away, until the only ones who remained were the ones who were too old or too young to climb down the mountain and Funeste herself.

Some murderers would have let their victims die of increasing doses of poison. But that, for Funeste, was not enough. She wanted the old fairy's blood, and she meant to have it.

No one knows what form she took when she entered her victim's bedroom that night. Some of the remaining servants later swore that she resembled a manticore, the teeth of its human face dripping with venom. One young scullery maid vowed that Funeste had been a two-headed serpent, the kind that scholars call an amphisbaena. But perhaps the most probable is the showiest of her transformations—a dragon, whose eyes and breath were both poisonous flame.

Whatever she became, the old fairy recognized her…or at least knew that she was one of the two sisters. For she uttered one last curse before the monster bit her in two, and it was meant for both of them.

"May both of you die at the moment of your greatest triumph—"

She might have meant to say more, but at that moment, the monster bit. And after that, there wasn't enough left of the old fairy to speak.

It was, of course, a complete coincidence that Queen Jeanne-Marie conceived of a son at the moment of the fairy's death.

And that she died nine months later, giving birth to him.

***

Years passed. Jeanne-Marie's son grew up, took the throne, married and, after a long time, sired a daughter. 

This did not interest Funeste—who had claimed and now ruled in the old fairy's mountain fastness—one iota. What did intrigue her was Bera's news that he was throwing a party for the entire kingdom in honor of the child. He was even inviting fae folk…including the three children of the wretch who had cursed his mother with asphyxiation, torn lips, and sterility, which was taking respect much too far.

Funeste was aware that few people liked her; it had ever been thus. But she was, after all, a power in her own right in the land—almost a queen. It would be _unthinkable_ to scorn a fairy queen. Especially one who had a reputation for having a hot temper and not being nice.

She gazed at Bera--who finally, finally, had the sleek black wings she had always coveted and who was now perched on Funeste's throne. "When do you think my nephew will invite _me_ to the christening?"

**Author's Note:**

> If you are interested, here's a picture of a European viper—or _Vipera berus_. As you can see, it does indeed have cobalt eyes.
> 
>  


End file.
